Re: Improvements to PostgreSQL

Patrick Welche wrote:
<snip>
> Is there more to "remote control" than setting GUC variables? Tell me more!

Sure:

  + starting/restarting/stopping the database server software
  + the normal DBA type work - creating/altering/dropping databases, 
users, functions, languages, permissions (etc)
  + Remote backup and recovery
  + Submitting jobs to run remotely on the server.  i.e. reindexing or 
vacuuming scripts

  Remote Monitoring:
  + Alerts for specified events.  i.e. The database server is getting 
near to capacity in it's filesystem(s), or there have been too many 
invalid PG authorisation attempts, or there are connections getting 
rejected because the max_connections parameter isn't high enough

  Groups
  + Defining arbitrary groups of servers for the above to speed things 
up when working with many servers

  Roles
  + Having multiple administrators with different permissions (role 
based is generally good), all communicating through the centralised info 
repository so things don't get out of sync

  (possibly)
  + loading additional PG packages.  i.e. rolling out "oid2name" or 
"pgbench" (or other PG utils) to servers.  Could be viewed as something 
that should be done with the OS packaging mechanism(s) instead.

Any of the PG GUI's (I generally use pgAdmin) could likely be extended 
to do all of this in a nice, user friendly way.

As an aside, SNMP is important in enterprise settings as it allows PG to 
be plugged into the monitoring capabilities of enterprise management 
frameworks.  i.e. Concord's eHealth, and probably Tivoli, OpenView, etc

Hope that's useful.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

> Cheers,
> 
> Patrick